Word: indianism
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...film to an airport X-ray machine. Giddily enjoyable but unsparing in its treatment of darker subjects like infidelity and pedophilia, Monsoon Wedding was the budget hit of 2001, topping the foreign-film box office in the U.S. and taking $30 million worldwide?the most ever for an Indian film. "Monsoon Wedding was so rich with emotion and color," says Juliette Lewis, describing why she signed to star with Uma Thurman in Nair's 2002 HBO production Hysterical Blindness. "I'm always looking for the freshest filmmakers out there, and there this was, almost an epic, with the universal human...
...adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair is her biggest film yet. Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, the 1820s London social climber who set the bar by which such mountaineers would forever after be measured. The buzz is all about how Nair has played up Thackeray's Indian influences?he was born in Calcutta?including a Bollywood dance number and an ending shot in the Rajasthani fort town of Jodhpur. The New York Times griped about the "outlandish" sight of Witherspoon doing a "grinding Indian-flavored hoochy-cooch, worthy of Britney Spears," saying it seemed "shoehorned in from...
...tempting to trace this never-look-back attitude to Nair's childhood. She was born into a middle-class civil servant's family in Bhubaneswar, a dirt-poor city in eastern India that is usually given a wide berth by tourists. "Even in Indian terms, it's really remote," she says. Nair was also, she claims, an unwanted child?or, as she puts it, a "contraceptual blunder." In 1957 the Indian government was worried about its exploding population, and her father, a senior bureaucrat, had sworn to limit the family to the two sons they already had. He sent...
...elder brothers. Then came her first experience of theater, in festival dramatizations of mythic Hindu tales. The performances "possessed my mind," she recalls, and also provided a means of escape, allowing her to act in plays in New Delhi. By 18, studying and performing at university in the Indian capital, Nair was applying to every U.S. college she could think of, already displaying the resolve and energy that would mark her life. Mamdani describes film as Nair's ideal medium. "Mira often says she left documentaries for fiction because she got tired of waiting for things to happen." The role...
...Moreover, director Mira Nair has created a pretty panorama?populated with solid actors like Bob Hoskins and Gabriel Byrne?of English life in the Georgian era for Becky to master. It is more exotic than Thackeray's, more laden with the booty of a burgeoning colonial empire, but Nair, Indian by birth, is entitled to her opinions about the exploitations on which England's wealth was based...